Friday, May 26, 2006

The 'Don't Touch Me" Duet from SAP/MSFT vs "Build It As You Please" from others

As pointed out by Josh Greenbaum of ZDnet in this post, Project Harmony from IBM connects Notes to SAP and multiple other data sources. Is'nt that great? I mean, how many customers have no other application system other than SAP? That any desktop application technology should be multi-rooted, and connect to several data sources, is surely a no-brainer.

Better, Harmony can be changed out customer site, using Lotus tools - as declared by Rocky Oliver here. As Rocky observes " Duet is a "closed" application, meaning that you cannot modify it at all - you either use it as-is, or you don't use it. " Without doubt, the approach followed by IBM, and my firm, Extensio for desktop integration, that come along with its development tools, is far more extensible and flexible than Duet. Although Harmony works only on Notes, and that makes it unusable by most enterprise users who are on MS Office, it certainly is built better.

I was amused by the comparison of effort required by Duet and Harmony. Rocky claims Harmony was done by two/three engineers - while Duet took 2 whole years with hundreds of engineers in the making. But that is another story.